


Life Finds a Way

by Gigi_Sinclair



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 04:05:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6408046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gigi_Sinclair/pseuds/Gigi_Sinclair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alan hears about the events at Jurassic World.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Finds a Way

Alan and Billy will not be having a destination wedding at Jurassic World.

It's a joke among their circle, started by Ellie's eighteen-year-old son Charlie, who is himself still the subject of many comments about his once-consuming love of Barney. It spreads to the Internet when Alan mentions his engagement—against his will—on the Ellen Degeneres show and she donates ten thousand dollars to his non-profit organization, Better as Bones, as a wedding present.

This is Alan's legacy. He dreamed, long ago, about being immortalized in the name of a dinosaur, or perhaps as the originator of some ground-breaking paleontological theory. But John Hammond changed all that, and now Alan will be known as the man who wanted dinosaurs dead. While Billy—tenured professor Dr. William Brennan—lectures at Stanford, Alan discusses the dangers of playing God. He gives a TED Talk. He writes two more books. He goes around the world informing, educating, proselytizing in conference centres and university lecture halls. He has adherents. Many are religious, particularly American fundamentalist Christians. Alan can't afford to turn away supporters, no matter how strenuously he disagrees with the rest of their views, but Billy nearly laughs himself sick watching these fundamentalists trying to reconcile themselves with Alan's sexuality and Ellen Degeneres' large donation. 

Still, those are his backers, his fans. Most people do not agree with Alan's views. Many don't disparage him personally. They acknowledge that he's a well-respected paleontologist, a man of science, but they claim he's been damaged by his own experiences. The first Jurassic Park was too primitive, they agree. Today's technology is far superior; it can't even compare. Alan is wrong, some of them believe, to deny others the life-changing experience of seeing live dinosaurs just because the world wasn't ready twenty-three years ago, or fifteen years ago. What happened to Alan, and Billy, and Ellie, and the others, they say, will never happen again. That's the part that really gets to Alan, the phrase that keeps him going, keeps him travelling away from home and Billy and paleontology, which he still loves, on this often disheartening crusade. _It will never happen again_ haunts Alan's dreams and keeps him awake at night.

“Don't worry,” Billy says, whenever Alan is feeling particularly down. When Simon Masrani has publicly threatened to sue him, or when his latest book is eviscerated by some pundit on CNN. “One day you'll be proven right.”

“I hope not,” Alan says, but he knows it's only a matter of time. 

Billy is the best—the only good—thing to come out of Alan's association with John Hammond and his madness. While Isla Nublar tore Alan and Ellie apart, Isla Sorna brought Alan and Billy together. It didn't seem so, for a while, but as soon as that helicopter set down on American soil, Alan knew he wasn't going to lose Billy again. 

He hasn't. He's had the good fortune to hang on to this gorgeous, brilliant man nearly twenty years his junior. Not only to hang on to him, but to make him think, somehow, that they should marry. He has Ian Malcolm to thank for that. Alan and Billy met up with him at a conference in Rome, which Malcolm was attending with his fourth, or possibly fifth, wife. “Love,” Malcolm said, looking meaningfully at Billy and Alan, “is the strongest force in the universe.”

“I thought that was life,” Alan replied.

Malcolm winked. “Can't have one without the other, man.” 

It's a stupid statement, a meaningless catchphrase. Like all Malcolm's bon mots, it's the kind of thing that belongs on the cover of a mass-market paperback. But Billy, being the romantic he is, took it to heart. Two days later, in a gondola in Venice, he proposed. 

“You're taking advice from a man who's been married five times?” Alan replied. 

“Is that a yes?” Billy countered. 

Alan nodded. He would have been insane to do otherwise, and, while they may have taken his academic career and most of his life, the cross-bred dinosaurs of InGen haven't taken his sanity. 

It will be a small wedding. They have no groomsmen, although Charlie is very eager to give a speech at the reception. Alan's reaction to that can only be called “trepidatious”, although Billy can't wait to hear it. While there's not much conventional about this wedding, Alan is, at heart, a conventional man. The night before, he leaves Billy and his younger faculty friends to live it up at their house, and checks into a hotel. “We can't see each other until the wedding,” he explains to Billy. “It's bad luck.” 

“Spoken like a scientist,” Billy teases, but he kisses Alan—in front of his friends, which still gives Alan a frisson, like they're doing something scandalous and shocking—and lets him go. 

Alan doesn't sleep. The hotel is quiet enough, but the bed is harder than he is used to. And he misses Billy, although he's loath to admit it. _You're marrying him tomorrow_ , a voice inside him, the one that always sounds suspiciously like Ellie, tells him. _You can admit it._

Just before three o'clock, he gets out of bed and walks over to the window. The room is on a high floor, overlooking twinkling city lights. Cars drive up and down even at this time of night, and, in the far distance, Alan can see a sliver of the ocean. Alan's suit, plain grey with a grey-striped tie, hangs in the small closet, and Billy's wedding ring sits in a red velvet box atop the dresser. It's a gold band, inset with three tiny diamonds. Billy chose it himself, but the engraving, “The strongest force in the universe”, is Alan's. Billy will get a kick out of it, although Malcolm will never let him live it down. Billy will also love the initials engraved beside it, Alan's and Billy's, intertwined. Ellie assured him it was a very romantic gesture. He checked with her to be sure.

Alan holds up the ring and looks through it, gazing at the world far below. He returns the ring to its box when his phone buzzes. 

Alan's appreciation for technology hasn't improved, but it's become ubiquitous. Billy forces him to update his phone regularly, far more regularly than any human being has need to, and it is Billy texting him now. _Turn on your TV_ , it says. Intrigued, Alan picks up the remote control. 

It's everything Alan ever feared would happen. Screaming children, sobbing families, people with red crosses on their sleeves rushing around frantically. Shaky cellphone videos of pterodactyls ripping the limbs off living people and crouching possessively over corpses. A ticker tape that runs below the screen with words like “carnage” and “tragedy” and “Jurassic World.” _Hundreds believed dead_ , Alan reads, clutching Billy's ring in his fist. _Many more unaccounted for_. As he watches the words scroll across the bottom of the screen, his phone buzzes again, then again, and again. The little chime that Billy insisted he needs, so Alan can tell when he has a new email, starts dinging nonstop. This is his moment, the one he's waited for since he escaped Isla Nublar. Now, the world finally understands what Alan's been trying to tell them for more than twenty years.

 _Go to bed_ , he texts Billy. Alan has no role to play in this disaster. He can't stop it, and he's certainly not going to gloat. Maybe he can help the survivors, one day, but that day won't be tomorrow.

 _Tomorrow_ , Alan thinks, as he switches off the TV and turns off his phone, _is my wedding day._

It's a day for him, and more importantly a day for Billy, and for once in Alan's life, manufactured amusement park dinosaurs aren't going to ruin anything.


End file.
